Reviews

A peculiar Rosetta stone of Miyazaki’s career, in the shape of an original TV adventure with 26 episodes (29 minutes each). Miyazaki has the overall direction credit, storyboarded many of the episodes (including the beginning and ending), directed many of them (again including the beginning and ending) and is sometimes credited with some of the writing as well. He also did mechanical and character design, but it’s clear that he did not have the power he would later wield at Ghibli.

Subject

July, 2008 CE. Humankind faced extinction. Far surpassing nuclear arms, super-electromagnetic weapons annihilated half the world in an instant. There were great changes in the Earth’s crust, the axis of rotation shifted, and all five continents ruptured, sinking into the sea.

20 years later, a child has grown to the threshold of puberty on one little island. It turns out not to be the only island left in the world.

Commentary

Apart from the many moments of superficial similarity with other works by Miyazaki, particularly Castle in the Sky (1986), there is a gentleness all the way through Conan: a warm and fuzzy, occasionally numinous glow compromising the generally shounen-style narrative. The animation is cheap and dated, the story is sexist and not as environmentalist as it may seem, but this is clearly Miyazaki’s glow.